Competitive Intelligence: The Secret Weapon in Business Strategy

Big Fish Results Founder, Tony Guarnaccia intrigued a full-capacity crowd on Tuesday April 7 at the Newport Interactive Marketers networking event. Drawing upon 15+ years of experience, Guarnaccia gave an animated and detailed lecture to help Rhode Island’s local businesses, bigger brands, and agencies improve their strategic planning.

Guarnaccia has always had an entrepreneurial spirit, even sharing a personal anecdote through candid conversation about how he sold violins as a kid in order to earn money for his spring break. Guarnaccia still utilizes the same business drive in his techniques to prosper his company as well as his clients’.

Throughout Guarnaccia’s presentation “Secrets of Your Competition,” the main question that connected his marketing insights is WHY?

It’s important to understand the marketing attributes of your competitors, but the information is useless if you don’t know what to do with it. If a competitor is thriving or failing at something … ask yourself “WHY?” and then take action.

Big Questions

When conducting a competitive analysis, Big Fish Results uses a top-down process to answer five questions:

How much traffic do you generate versus your competitors?

Where is this traffic coming from?

How much does your competitor spend on advertising?

What are the specific search terms they use to create SEO?

And then WHY this data occurs.

Tools to Use

To answer these questions, there are several online tools your company can use to acquire data on your competitors. But remember, as Guarnaccia says, “The tools aren’t the secret, it’s what you do with them that makes a difference.” Here are just a few examples:

SEMrush

Google Trends

Google Keyword Planner

Similar Web

Simply Measured

Competitive Intelligence

Once you’ve acquired information on your competitors, this is how Big Fish Results would move utilize it:

Segment your data

Look at trends

Benchmark

Filter

Exclude Brand Keywords

CREATE ACTION!

Use these techniques and you could be a “Big Fish” in your market. Now get to work luring in your own competitors’ intelligence.

NIM Networking event, “Secrets of Your Competition” shaped up to be a great night! Here’s what some of the Newport Interactive Marketers were saying on Twitter: